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2013 Honorees and Prize Winners Announced at AFS Annual Meeting

AFS would like to congratulate all of the honorees and prize recipients named at the 2013 annual meeting in Providence. For more information on prizes and honors awarded by AFS, please click here. To learn more about the many prizes awarded by AFS sections, please click here.

American Folklore Society Honors and Prize Winners

The following individuals received AFS lifetime achievement prizes
for 2013:

Jim Griffith (formerly of the University of Arizona)
received the Américo Paredes Prize, recognizing excellence in
integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one
studies.

Paddy Bowman (Local Learning) and Kay Turner (Brooklyn Arts
Council and New York University) shared the Benjamin A. Botkin Prize for
lifetime achievement in public folklore.

In addition, Laura J. Olson (University of
Colorado) and Svetlana Adonyeva (University of St. Petersburg) received the
Chicago Folklore Prize, given to the best folklore book of the year, for The Worlds of Russian Village Women:
Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press).

The Fellows of the American Folklore Society named five new
members: Robert Baron (New York State Council on the Arts) José Limón
(University of Notre Dame), Gerald Pocius (Memorial University of
Newfoundland), Kay Turner (Brooklyn Arts Council and New York University), and
Michael Ann Williams (Western Kentucky University).

American Folklore Society Section Prize Winners

The Children’s Folklore Section awards the Aesop Prize and
Aesop Accolade honorable mentions each year to English-language fiction and nonfiction
books for children and young adults. The 2013 Aesop Prize went to Deborah
Ellis for her book Looks Like Daylight.
2013 Aesop Accolades go to Judy
Goldman for her book Whiskers, Tails,
& Wings: Animal Folktales from Mexico (illustrated byFabricio Vandenbroeck), to Rosanne Parry for Written
in Stone, and to Odile Weulersse for Nasreddine
(illustrated byRebecca Dautremer).

The
Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section presented its 2013 William A. Wilson
Undergraduate Student Paper Prize to Sara Budsock (Susquehanna University) for
her paper "He’s One of Ours: Ethnic Preservation in the Slovak Catholic Church
of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, 1920-1930.” The section also presented its 2013
Don Yoder Graduate Student Prize to Kinga Povedak (University of Szeged, Hungary) for her paper "Catholicism in Transition: The ‘Religious Beat’
Movement in Hungary.”

The Folklore and Education Section
awards the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowshipin memory of folklorists Beverly
Robinson, Bea Roeder, and Vaughn Ward to an educator who is engaged in
folklore, ethnography, or cultural heritage and K–12 education. Natasha Agrawal,
an ESL teacher at Carroll Robbins Elementary School in Trenton, New Jersey, was
the recipient of the Robinson-Roeder-Ward Fellowship for 2013. The
section also awards the Dorothy Howard Prize to individuals and organizations
whose work effectively encourages K–12 educators or students to use or study
folklore and folkloristic approaches in all educational environments. There were
two recipients of the 2013 Dorothy Howard Prize: Pass It On: Cultural Traditions of the Lower Eastern Shore, A K–12
Curriculum and Activity Guide,by
the Ward Museum of Wildfowl ArtofSalisbury University, and Everyday Music,by Alan Govenar (Documentary Arts, Inc.), with the Everyday
Music Education Guide, by Paddy Bowman (Local Learning).

The Foodways Section
announces the winners of the 2013 Sue Samuelson Foodways Student Essay Prize.
First place was awarded to Diana Garvin (Cornell University) for her
paper "The Italian Kitchen as a Site for the Practice of Autarchy and Fascist
Intervention.” Second place went to Miriam Ruth Dike (Boston University) for
her paper "Exploring Evolving Moroccan Identities in the Diaspora.”

The Jewish Folklore and Ethnology
Section awards the Raphael Patai Prize each year to an outstanding unpublished student
essay in Jewish folklore and ethnology. The prize honors the eminent folklorist
and ethnologist Raphael Patai (1910–1996), who published 600 articles and over
35 books, and taught at many universities in Israel and the United States. The 2013
winner of the prize was Kate A. Reyes for her essay "Demonology and Magic
Ritual Texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” completed at the University of St.
Andrews, Scotland. Honorable mentions were awarded to Matthew Singer, doctoral
candidate in American Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg,
for his essay "Folk Art from the Peddler’s Bed: The Creative Legacy and
Historic Context of Jewish Fraktur Scriveners Justus Epstein and Martin
Wetzler,” and to Tsila Zan-Bar Tsur, who recently received her PhD in folklore
and traditional Jewish culture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for her
essay "The Bathhouse and the Mikveh: Transformative Spaces in the Life of
Jewish Women in Afghanistan.”

The New Directions in Folklore
Section awards the Bill Ellis Prize to the best graduate student essay that
combines research and analysis on folklore, broadly construed, and digital
culture, popular culture, or new media. This year’s prize was presented to
Andrea Glass (Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg), for her essay
"Blogging for Urban Authenticity and Cultural Authority: The East Village
Blog Mafia Battles Bloomberg, The Times,
and the Highline."

The Public Programs Section
provides a stipend each year to facilitate travel by a member of the AFS
Independent Folklorists' Section to the AFS annual meeting. Amy Skillman (Goucher College) was
the recipient of this year’s Independent Travel Award.

The Women’s Section has awarded
its Elli Köngäs-Maranda Professional Prize to Laura J. Olson(University of
Colorado) and Svetlana
Adonyeva(University of St. Petersburg) for their book The Worlds of
Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise. Honorable
mention went to Suzanne Seriff (Museum of International Folk Art) for the exhibition Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives That Transform Communities.
The Elli Köngäs-Maranda Student Prize went to Rachel Gonzalez (Indiana
University) for her paper "Quinceañeras as Ephemeral Autobiography:
Narrating Latina Lived-Experiences in America's Heartland."